8 july 2001

Before somebody asks me: no, I did not buy the Stan Lee/Batman book. This is principally because I am not interested in Stan Lee, I am not interested in Batman, and consequently a kind of multiplication effect applies in determining my lack of interest in the book. I know I normally pick up the first issue of anything to review for my loyal audience, but quite honestly the thought of shelling out almost five quid to buy a "reinvention" of an overused character by a writer who hasn't done anything interesting since before I could read... well, I draw the line. So I spent the money on a copy of The Best of Public Image Limited instead.

That leaves this column with one X-book, an anthology title, and the "gosh, aren't we cynical" Authority, which has an eight page preview of the new Establishment title. It's not much, but it'll have to do you.

And let's start with EXILES, the book that has yet to satisfactorily answer the question: "Yes, but WHY?"

Unfortunately, this issue pretty much confirms my fears about how this book might go. Judd Winick writes likeable characters, the plot bounces along pleasantly enough, and it's always good to see Mike McKone in gainful employment (though I'd still rather see him on a comedy book, which would really play to his strengths).

But ye gods, it's contrived. Last issue, you may recall, our heroes were packed off to their first alternate Earth to fix something unspecified. This apparently involved freeing "the one who would teach you." In the manner of these things, this needlessly vague instruction was misinterpreted by the heroes, who went and busted Professor X out of jail, only to find that he was a baddie in this universe.

This issue, Magneto turns out to be the hero, completing the elementary role-reversal. The heroes duly stop Professor X and set Magneto up in his hero role before buggering off home. Oh, and a rather watery character who was never very clearly established in the first place gets killed off. You get the general idea.

All of this leaves me cold. I've seen the role reversal routine in a thousand alternate reality stories, and this story brings nothing new to the idea. Nor is there anything particularly interesting about the world in question beyond that gimmick.

Then there's the arbitrariness of the plot to consider. The Exiles' mission, supposedly, is to "fix" problems in time. It's not made altogether clear quite why this constitutes fixing a problem. Granted, I come to this from a cynical and atheist perspective, but I don't accept as a given that all worlds are meant to be lovely and cuddly, and therefore "fixing a problem in the timeline" is necessarily synonymous with "improving the world." In fairness, Winick may well be deliberately setting up a few stories of this nature so that he can do the "damage this world to fix time" story a few months down the line. That's fair enough, but it leaves this story lacking any apparent reason for us to accept that the Exiles have achieved their mission other than that Blink's plot device tells them they've achieved it. That's not sufficient.

As I mentioned last time round, I have real difficulties with this whole premise as a basis for dramatic stories. It ended up hopelessly formulaic and contrived when Quantum Leap did it, and Exiles is at perpetual risk of going the same way. The book needs strong personalities and strong ideas for alternate realities to overcome its structural problems. It's not really there yet, particularly on the strength of the alternate realities, and the prospect of revisiting the trial of Dark Phoenix next month does not entirely encourage me.

This book could still work, but it needs some tuning.

Over on THE AUTHORITY, Tom Peyer and Dustin Nguyen find themselves in the very undesirable position of having to do a four part storyline in the middle of Mark Millar's final storyline. Millar's story has been interrupted by the departure of the artist and his replacement by the glacially slow Art Adams, and so Peyer and Nguyen have been asked to fill in with a four parter to fit between parts one and two of Millar's story. This is not easy, given that Millar's first part killed off the entire cast and replaced them with a stooge team of knock-offs.

Peyer's approach has been to build on Millar's development of a satirical edge to the series. You must bear in mind that this is Millar and Peyer's concept of satire, in which subtlety plays no part. What that means is that it's really just a glorified exercise in preaching to the converted. The basic point is that rich people in power are bad. This is a message that most people are delighted to get behind, since they are neither rich nor in power, and it makes them feel much better about the world if they can just blame it on somebody else. The world would be great if it wasn't for those bastards in power, etc etc.

What you end up with is a book that tries to insinuate that it has vaguely anarchist leanings without ever quite summoning up the nerve to come out and say so. For all that its fanbase likes to claim otherwise, the Authority is an incredibly old-fashioned book. Might makes right. The Authority get to beat up everyone, including elected governments, but that's okay, because they're right. We know they're right because the story says so. The cynical attitude is merely a simulation of intelligence; the book is basically about romanticising its own simplistic worldview, just as 1950s Superman used to romanticise his. Truth, justice and the anti-American way. The upshot is much the same.

The Authority proposes no way forward. It makes no constructive suggestions. It's rather pissed off about the world and thinks it could be improved in some vaguely specified manner. That's nice, lads. Now go and chuck a brick through a Starbucks and convince yourself that you're making a political point. "Things could be better" amounts to nothing more than the statement that the world is not perfect, which is not what I'd call a worthwhile insight.

None of this is meant to say that you shouldn't be enjoying the book. Just that it requires you to switch off your brain and buy into some highly simplistic politics to do so. I'm all for cynicism, god knows. But I'd rather see some intelligent, imaginative cynicism rather than the usual kneejerk attacks on the same old targets, even when they're targets I hate as well.

Anyhow... the only reason I'm reviewing this book, before I got swept off into a sideline, is because it's got an eight page preview of The Establishment, a new series they're launching in September. Rumours that WildStorm and Vertigo are having a competition to see who can milk the most spin-offs out of their most famous book have yet to be confirmed.

The gimmick of Establishment is apparently that the cast are based on assorted characters drawn from British popular entertainment, and judging from the previews that have been released, some of them looked worryingly close to being actionable. This story doesn't feature most of those characters. Rather, it's a scene of some British villains learning that the Establishment has been reformed, and preparing a scheme to defeat them. It also doubles as a continuity fix (in a WildStorm book?!) to establish why there's a London again, despite Warren Ellis having wisely bombed it off the face of the Earth in an early issue of Authority. On the one hand, I have friends in London who would be sorely missed. On the other hand, it would wipe a whole load of metrocentric media assholes off the planet at a stroke, so on balance I'd be in favour. Never mind.

Your writer here is Ian Edginton, who crashed X-Force into a ditch at the earliest opportunity. This opening story is a little more promising, if only because he doesn't seem to be trying so hard to fit a hundred plot twists into every page, and allows the story to take a more sensible course. It helps that he's got Charlie Adlard on art, who keeps things nicely moored in reality. The only real warning bell comes when a flashback to the Establishment's dissolution in the 1980s incorporates an utterly gratuitous scene of them fighting a demonic Margaret Thatcher. God knows she was an appalling woman, but this kind of heavy-handed nonsense was painfully unimaginative at the time. Nowadays, it's both painfully unimaginative and staler than five-year-old bread.

Nonetheless, some promise shown here. And as for the Authority, well, it's brainless fun.

ONI PRESS COLOR SPECIAL 2001 is an anthology, and those are absolute bastards to review. On the one hand, you can review all the individual stories, in which case you end up with a load of glorified capsule reviews. On the other hand, you can approach it as a package, in which case it ends up reading like one of those really dull reviews of art exhibitions which spends half the article expressing regret at how close together the paintings were hung. I have no particular solution to this, and so the following review is an uneasy combination of both which will probably read very badly.

Oni Press, as we all know, are one of the most consistently interesting indie publishers out there, who've long since shown that they had a lot more to offer than Kevin Smith. (Which is fortunate, given that he doesn't write for them any more.) On that basis, they can be forgiven an annual self-indulgence such as this. Be aware, however, that much of this book is very, very in-jokey. If you don't have a working knowledge of independent comics, forget about buying this. You'll miss half the jokes.

The stories here basically fall into three categories. First, there's the creators doing comedy versions of their regular books. You know the ten minute versions of regular programmes that you get on Comic Relief? Yes, like that. Only funny (for the most part). Second, there's trailers or bonus stories from other Oni series, done straight. And third, there's Tom Fowler's "Adventure #206", a cute story about kids playing games which isn't really my sort of thing, but does have some imaginative use of colour as a storytelling device (all the dialogue is represented as colour, in otherwise black and white art). So that's something for the serious analysts to ponder over.

Back at the comedy, though. There's a ten page Powers story, which is slightly odd given that they're published by Image. It's not really a story at all; the nominal plot is that the characters are investigating the death of Michael Allred's character Madman, but after a couple of initial jokes at the expense of Powers itself, it's basically about them visiting characters from other books and delivering a few jokes at their expense. Most of them are very funny - the David Mack and Red Star parodies are hilarious - but if you don't know the books, there is nothing for you here.

In a rather surprising display of in-fighting, the killer is revealed as John Byrne, incarnated in the form of "Ultimate Ego, the Living Planet." Just to emphasise that Marvel have given their blessing to this, the copyright warning and "used with permission" note actually appears in the panel. It's funny, but I'm starting to wish somebody would sort out this tedious feud with John Byrne by arranging a boxing match in a pub car park or something. We get the idea, guys. You all think he's a hasbeen asshole. He thinks that he's still big, and it's the comics that got small. Point taken - shall we draw a line under it now?

The Blue Monday strip is a one-joke idea spun off from the little mini-versions of the characters who occasionally crop up in page borders of the regular series. Much as I like the book, this doesn't do much for me.

In a book that's obviously mainly aimed at adult comics fans who want to read in-jokes, the appearance of an Alison Dare: Little Miss Adventures strip seems wildly out of place, despite the guest appearance of some other indie character I've never even heard of. Basically a daydreaming routine (unless the series itself has some kind of Goodnight Sweetheart routine going on, in which case it would actually make more sense), and again it doesn't do much for me.

Over in the straightforward previews, Kissing Chaos is a four page strip previewing an upcoming series from Arthur dela Cruz. It looks to be an introduction to the cast combined with a few musings on the nature of love. As a story, it's not much of anything, but as a trailer it's intriguing. The art appears to be incorporating doctored photographs as backgrounds, which is something new. All very soft focus. I'll be keeping an eye out for the miniseries, at least.

Hopeless Savages - another comedy book which Oni have been muttering about publishing for over a year now - finally gets a preview story of enough length to let us judge something about it. This is a cute comedy romance story, which seems to have a similar affection for mod fashion to Blue Monday. Not bad, although a bit predictable and the "let's beat up the homophobes" sequence at the end really just makes more of an issue of the gay couple than it needed to.

The Coffin is a title that slipped completely under my radar, but on the strength of the six pages here I'll have to keep an eye out for the trade paperback. The concept is that the lead character is dead but has sealed his body inside a robot shell that keeps his soul present and in control. It's a rather weird few pages of the character removing the faceplate to stare at his dead face in the mirror. Odd, but very effective. This is the sort of thing Vertigo used to put out back before they started lagging behind. Or maybe the character design just reminds me of The Extremist.

The Queen & Country story is a dead straight and wholly unnecessary explanation of what happened between issues #1 and #2 of that series. That was pretty obvious anyway, and this story never really finds much more to say about it. It's a good series, but this seems superfluous.

And finally, a one page strip by the excellent Gail Simone and Lea Hernandez, trailing their Killer Princesses series. A couple of nice one-liners, but there's not much you can do with one page trailers. Though come to think of it, I've no idea why people don't do house ads in this format. I can't even think of anyone who's tried it aside from Marvel UK back in the eighties.

Anyhow... where does all this leave us? It leaves us with a book that's got a few stories that are good in their own right, a few more which are effective as trailers, and a couple of misfires. The prevailing tone of "last day of school" comedy also means that the three straight stories really stand out oddly. Still, it is what it is - Oni celebrating their own output. And looking at their roster, they've got a right to celebrate.